Load Enemies on a large (tile-)map

Hi,

After some testing and playing around, I started a tilemap-based 2D top-down RPG game. I have created a kinda large map and now I'm willing to populate it with NPC's and enemies.
My enemies are ScriptableObjects, spawned by a MonsterSpawner-Prefab which are intented to approach the player on sight.

On my whole map, I'm planning to place dozens of Spawners. My idea was that these spawners are only supposed to spawn enemies, when the player is close enough.

And here is the clue: Is it any performant to calculate the distance to dozens of spawners each frame? Or would you recommend another approach or mechanism to efficiently populate my map with enemies?

 

How does your character move around the map? Is it like the old Final Fantasy / Pokemon / Uncharted Waters where they move one tile at a time? Or more like the Zelda games where it's basically free movement?

If it's the first one, I'd absolutely have an event fire when the player stops moving that can be consumed by the Spawner system to determine if enemies should be generated. If it's the second, you'll have to do it more frequently (doesn't have to be in an Update... could be every few seconds or something), but I would do it in one manager that has access to all of the spawn points. The manager system knows about the player and their position, and can determine if it should spawn enemies and where they should be spawned.

 

It's more like the old Zelda games, you have a free, seamless movement around all the tiles.
I like your idea of a general SpawnManager, measuring distances and controlling the spawns in fixed frequency...

I will try that out, thank you!

 

Can you release your finished game when it's done? I like the old style RPGs

 

@RichAllen2016 for sure, but since I'm a Unity beginner doing this in my spare free time this gonna take quite a while